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Tackling Vista (Amongst Other Things)

I’ve spent the better part of the weekend setting up Windows Vista Pre RC1 and ripping my hair out in the process. The biggest thing is still drivers, drivers, drivers. They’re either not mature enough or unavailable. Take for example the video drivers. Sure Windows Update installed ‘some’ driver for the nVidia card in my laptop, but it wasn’t even enough to run Aero Glass. So I had to do some searching to find the latest driver, which was unfortunately not available for laptop cards. So I had to get a modified configuration file to be able to manually install it. That did the trick and I’ve been running the Aero theme with no problems. Unfortunately, that got rid of the nVidia control panel so I’ve been using a hack and slash way to get dual monitors working between the laptop and this LG 20.1″ LCD. Sometimes it works when I boot up; other times it fails horribly.

Then I ran into problems with the audio driver. At first the audio device could not be initialized with the default Vista driver so I had to find a newer version. Unfortunately, that install didn’t work so I had to manually update the driver again. I got sound after that, but the Realtek updater service would crash everytime at bootup so I tried uninstalling the Realtek software. That caused the driver to uninstall as well. For some reason after that, no amount of uninstalling, disabling or updating the driver would get the sound to work. Keep in mind, it had been working, with the exact same driver not 10 minutes beforehand. I ended up finding yet another driver, which is now working. I definitely won’t be tinkering with those drivers any more.

So I received that parts I mentioned I ordered this past Friday. I started setting up Friday night (yeah, what a loser I am) and finished up Monday morning. You may also remember that I had gotten a new CPU in from Intel, replacing the old one, which I believed to be defective. Yeah right, ends up, it’s probably motherboard’s problem. I’ve now switched power supplies, video cards, RAM, hard drives and CPUs and I still get the same damn error. ASUS got a stern email from me earlier today after I tried everything in my power to resuscitate that machine. I’ve spent basically the time I haven’t spent on frigging with Vista frigging with this motherboard. How fun.

Shamefully, I’ve been attracted by Facebook recently. It really is quite viral. I’ve all but caved into the pressure. Don’t judge me by it. I still hate MySpace. 🙂 I also realized I haven’t actually posted about my visit to PEI. I mostly remembered this because I had a dream that I was still on PEI visiting. Twas very weird to say the least. I’ll have to prep some pictures to post on here. Prepare to be embarrassed.

4 thoughts on “Tackling Vista (Amongst Other Things)”

I love the contrast between your blog and mine:P I bet no one could guess what we’re studying! Your blog is starting to get more and more out of my range of understanding :p Or maybe I am just getting dumber and dumber the deeper I delve into the mysterious world of arts….wish me luck.

Ah! I can’t believe it took me over a day to read this update. Shamefull, shamefull. I told you you’d fall prey to the Facebook. I don’t like the new look though. I say bring back the old one. And I have some pictures that I didn’t send you because you ran out of room on your FTP server. Oh, and need I say it? HAHA!!!! With a Mac, it just works. No need to go running around on the internet looking for drivers. Pfft, why waste time doing that when you could be using your computer for something useful? Like running Aqua.